This week we’ll examine more techniques of making meaningful sound on the page to carry emotion and momentum.

Onomatopoeia
The term onomatopoeia comes from the Greek for “word-making.” It means the employment of one or more words to imitate, echo, or suggest the sound of the thing or action described. Such words include “bang”, “click”, “fizz”, “hush”, “buzz”, “moo,” “quack” and “meow.” When you pay attention to the sounds of our language, you soon realize how many of our words are onomatopoetic: bounce, boom, clap, clang, crackle, hiccup, ping pong, pitter-patter, plop, poof, snore, swoosh, slither, slop, splat, thud, tick-tock, and zap.

In Spunk and Byte, author Arthur Plotnik writes on the value of using good sound words like click and gulp, whomp and wallop, garble, gobble, and squawk. Onomatopoeia represents sound on the page even when we can’t find a word to do it: brrrinnggg, ka-ching, vroom, thunk, ka-zoom, and psht psht, for instance.

Here are several examples that are often chosen from literature to illustrate the use of onomatopoeia:

Poe’s “The Raven,” includes “the silken, sad, uncertain/Rustling of each purple curtain,” rustling being a word that mimics the sound the curtain is making.

Lord Byron wrote in part LXXVIII of “Canto the Seventh“:
Bombs, drums, guns, bastions, batteries, bayonets, bullets,–
Hard words, which stick in the soft Muses’ gullets.
Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in “The Princess, Part vii“:
Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
Taking lessons from poets, we can infuse both our poetry and our prose with onomatopoeia by concentrating on using verbs, adjectives and nouns that imitate the sounds of the lives we are portraying. If you want to talk about how a brisk household employee walks, you might use onomatopoeia in a verb: All day, her heels clicked their way between the kitchen and the living room. If you want to show the way a dripping faucet bothers a lonely man as he is trying to fall asleep, you can use onomatopoeia in nouns: The drip, drip, drip of the tiny kitchen’s sink faucet kept him awake as if it were the dawn to dusk chirping of a chipmunk in heat. Here is a phrase with an adjective that has onomatopoeia: The snappy rhythm of her pea shelling made him feel welcome.

Your Turn
You can practice using onomatopoeia by concentrating on describing the sounds of the events you experience. To practice, I wrote a description of garbage collection day in Los Angeles, where my husband and I lived for awhile. Using onomatopoeia came naturally as I tried to capture the experience of waking up to the sound of the collection:
On garbage collection days, the disposal company my husband calls Loud and Early slams and smashes its way into our sleep. We hear garbage cans scrap the top of the thick rusty truck, then clatter across the asphalt and cement of street and curb. When we hear the garbage truck grind the dregs of our existence to a pulp, we slide our feet to the floor. A police helicopter hurls its hello from overhead, shaking the walls and shattering any memory of our dreams.
The words slams, smashes, scrap, clatter, grind, slide, hurls, shaking and shattering came easily.

Describe a noisy situation you routinely encounter. Look for opportunities to use onomatopoetic words or inventions

Next, choose a quiet place to describe; are you using words like whisper, shush, and hum?

And try this: write about a person you know well. Describe the sound this person makes as he or she goes about some part of their daily routine or enters a room. Does this person clank a row of coffee cups? Crack gum? Snap rubber bands?

Finally, play with onomatopoeia this way: ascribe sound to other senses. For instance, here I’ve given a sight image a sound: Sunlight crackled through the broken window.

You can give sound to smell: Her perfume sashayed through the room before she did.

You can give sound to taste: The curry clamored over his uninitiated tongue like an invading army.

And you can give sound to touch: Her fingers hushed over the 1000 thread-count sheets.

Sometimes words sound like something feels: sleeze, grease, sneer, glitter, wrinkle, and pulp, for instance. These, too, are vibrant words in description and combine well with onomatopoeia: The grease sizzled in the hot iron pan, splattering into the depths of her wrinkled apron.

Give this a try: Describe a person involved in some action (like cooking, sewing, playing ball or tennis or golf, gardening or driving) by using words that imitate the sound of the action as well as words that sound like something feels: He placed the golf ball on the tee taking pleasure in the feel of its dimpled surface. When he hit the ball correctly, the thwack of his club left him exhilarated. He bent down to retrieve the tee and walked confidently toward his next shot, the wheels of his pull cart chirping over the grass.

Alliteration
Alliteration is the name for neighboring words with the same beginning sound. In my description of garbage collection day in Los Angeles there are a few uses of alliteration: “slams and smashes,” “feet to the floor,” “helicopter hurls,” and “shaking and shattering.” Whether the words start with soft sounds or hard sounds, having the beginning sound repeat evokes feeling as well as supplies energy to a description, making it memorable.

Here are examples of alliteration from literature:

Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night” has this line: I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet.”

Helen Keller’s prose “Three Days to See” includes: “Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail.”

In the novel A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry wrote: “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”

Your Turn
Look at what you wrote describing a quiet or a noisy place. Notice any alliteration that entered the writing. See if you can expand on what you started.

Next, think about a sound from childhood that you could hear from your bed when it was time to go to sleep or you had just woken up or a sound in a place you often sat: the sound of pots clanging as your mother looked for just the right one, the sound of doors slamming or doors squeaking, the sound of your father’s razor blade tapping against the porcelain sink, the sound of a drill when you were at the dentist’s office.

With a specific image in mind, write a description of yourself in that situation, using alliteration as much as you can. Some of the alliteration will be to get the sound of your experience in the readers’ ears. And some of the alliteration you use will tell readers about the emotions of the time: I sat in the dentist’s chair, every inch of my eight-year-old self braced against what I knew was coming because I’d been there before. My hands on the armrest made a clench to calm the cracking sound I knew I’d hear inside my head. This was the third baby tooth he’d taken since the roots hadn’t dissolved and the big teeth were blocked and held back from their rightful place.

Rhyme
Most of us were brought up on limericks, nursery rhymes and greeting card verse and can easily identify the words that rhyme in the traditional way, from the “blue” and “you” in “Roses are red / Violets are blue, / Sugar is sweet ‘/ And so are you” to the rhyming “sicken” and “thicken”, “die” and “cry” in Mark Twain’s lampoon in Huckleberry Finn: “And did young Stephen sicken, / And did young Stephen die? / And did the sad hearts thicken, /And did the mourners cry? Our ears are also tuned to the entertaining sound of words inside lines rhyming fully: I did cry because the fly / was ready to eat the meat.”

When we chant the famous nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock,” we hear a familiar full rhyme in the first and second words and then at the ends of line one and two, but there is also a more subtle rhyme, one we call a slant rhyme, in the third and fourth line endings:
Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down,
Hickory, dickory, dock
“One” and “down” rhyme because of their vowel sounds. This is slant rhyme, meaning that either the consonants that begin or end words with stressed syllables rhyme (consonance) as in “clock” and “struck” and “blanket” and “forget,” or the vowel sounds of the words rhyme (assonance) as in “or” and “horn.”

It gets more complicated with other terms that further define how many parts of the words rhyme, but understanding that insides and outsides of words can rhyme and bring good sound to your writing is enough to work with effectively as a writer.

Most writers today prefer slant rhyme to full rhyme. Full rhymes are thought to easily detract from the emotional message of writing because they become chime-y and sing-songy. It may be that in times past full rhyme was a means to remembering what one heard; the change in what writers and readers favor is probably due to the fact that today we usually read rather than listen to writing. It may also be that the subtle sound of slant rhyme brings more pleasure because it sounds modern and sophisticated.

Here are lines from Richard Hugo’s poem “Letter to Synder from Montana.” They convey feeling well with the use of slant rhyme at the end and in the interior of lines:
Dear Gary: As soon as you’d gone winter snapped shut again
on Missoula. Right now snow from the east and last night
cold enough to arrest the melting of ice.
“Again,” “night” and “ice” employ slant rhyme in line endings. “Soon” and “you’d,” and “Now” and “snow” and “east” and “last” employ slant rhyme in the interiors of the lines.

Of course “snapped shut” employs both onomatopoeia and alliteration.

Look at lines from another of Hugo’s poems, “Letter to Wagoner from Port Townsend”:
all said, this is my soul, the salmon rolling in the strait
and salt air loaded with cream for our breathing.
And around the bend a way, Dungeness Spit. I don’t need
Can you identify the long “e” sound of the vowels rhyming in the last two line endings? Do you notice the way five words that start with “s” come close together, causing alliterative sound–said, soul, salmon, strait, salt?

Your Turn
1) To experiment with these kinds of sounds, write a paragraph as if you are:
A person who is slamming the door and leaving the house because of a fight with someone you live with. Write about where you are going and what you hope to do there and what will be there and why it is necessary for you to leave. Do the words sound angry? Lonely? Sad? Where in the sounds of the words are those feelings coming from? What terms would you use to describe them: assonant, consonant, alliterative, onomatopoetic?

2) Now, write a paragraph that expresses the thoughts of someone who has needed a place to rest because they have been traveling a long time, or run out of money, or been thrown out of a situation. Write about what the person notices in the environment they have been allowed into. Ask yourself the same question about the feelings the words convey. Check to see if you have used the sound techniques we’ve been talking about.
My experience is that when we are writing well from an emotional situation by using specifics and the five senses, the words almost automatically use slant rhyme and alliterative associations. Our job as writers is to notice the tone of the words that sound right and then to weed out the words that don’t convey the meaning we find in our words. For instance, at first, I wrote the example about the golfer this way: He placed the golf ball on the tee taking pleasure in the feel of its dimpled surface. When he hit the ball correctly, the thwack of his club left him exhilarated. He bent down to retrieve the tee and walked confidently toward his next shot, the wheels of his pull cart squeaking over the grass.

The word “squeaking” seemed out of tone, more like something annoying than pleasurable. So I substituted chirping, which seems merry, like the golfer in this situation.

When you practice with sound, make bold strokes and do the best you can. When you read what you wrote and work on revising, be sensitive to tone. Most of the time, once you are working “in flow” the in-tone words will dominate, but sometimes, you have to work a little to find just the right sound word.